Death Row: A View from the South October 16, 2009

As a child, when I thought of the prison system in the South, I thought about images I’d seen in old black and white documentary films and archival photos taken in the 1920s and 1930s, of African American men shackled together on chain gangs and on “work farms.” About death row.  About images like the one above.  To me, the “face” of death row prisoners was the “face” of people of color, people who were poor, people who couldn’t pay for quality legal defense, who found themselves imprisoned and condemned to die, whether they were actually guilty or not.  People like nationally broadcast radio morning talk show host Tom Joyner’s maternal great-uncles, executed in 1915 in South Carolina for a murder they didn’t commit.  This week the State of South Carolina pardoned them posthumously, albeit too late for the great-uncles and their families to fully enjoy the justice that was finally served.  Economically disadvantaged people like Cameron Todd Willingham, innocent and executed, the focus of NCADP’s “Shouting from the Rooftops” campaign.

Walter Rhett, an African American blogger in Charleston, South Carolina, was born in Charlotteville, Virginia and raised in South Carolina where Joyner’s great-uncles Thomas and Meeks Griffin were wrongfully convicted and executed nearly a century ago.  His perspective on capital punishment, “Death Row,” can be found at http://bit.ly/1SGxUv.